Placing MOOCs in the Larger Context of “Innovations” in Education

The Sorbonne Universités consortium of universities hosted a colloquium on Trends in Innovative Education last week. I was pleased to present our recent work with data from the edX platform, and I highlighted two major points.

First, I presented the quantitative results from our predictive models, which investigate which student behaviors and background factors are significantly related to achievement. Our RPA article describes this overall study, and Lori has highlighted some of the key findings here.

Second, I highlighted the complexity of the data that we are dealing with in this new educational context and the need to reconceptualize traditional variables. Having spent the last year and a half wading through this tangled and rich dataset, I am acutely aware of this issue! Our group has demonstrated this challenge in a working paper that you can find here. This study was just accepted for publication, so check back at our publications site or our Twitter feed to see when it’s available online!

This reinforced for me the fact that MOOCs are just one in a suite of tools that administrators, policymakers, researchers, and instructors are investigating to reform and improve college and university teaching and learning. In the Q&A session after my talk, our discussion returned to this point—what parts of this tool work? for whom? and how can it be added to an instructor’s toolkit to support his or her students?